200+ Hours Worth of Thoughts

[Shattered Rift]

This thread's going to cover a fair bit of ground on different subjects. Some thoughts will be about quality of life tweaks, some will be about balance, and some might be about the burnout I'm having 200 hours in.

I'll start with some general thoughts and bullet points.

Firstly, some of my first impressions that I never got around to mentioning because I was so hooked on the game:
-A number on the lower-left(?) to show the number of cards in hand would be helpful. The positions of cards at different hand sizes requires me to count far too often.
-Banish cards leaving the deck shouldn't go in front of the center enemy in the front row. As a newbie, it looked like Burning Bloods were causing damage as they left the deck, and it confused me.
-Really, a lot of things happen in the middle of the screen and cover the game board. Cards leaving the deck. Certain effects. Choosing cards for picks or discards. It gets in the way and it's annoying when you can't check the board to confirm your choice before you make it.
-Multiple triggers can happen so fast that it's hard to know what happened (most true as a new player, also true when all enemies have Agile or a big stack of things is happening). Double Crawling Nightmare as a newbie is the best example. A possible text log of events would be one solution to this.
-Stargaze and Stargazer need names that are more different from each other. Stargazer is another example where you're picking a card in the center and can't look at the board.

A few random glitches and issues I've noticed:
-Thistles and Thorns killed the guy who negates cards, but my first card was still negated the following turn.
-Dark Side only adds a Dark Mark to the deck if the hand has <=9 cards after resolving
-Brass Goblet gives energy BEFORE your card pick. If you spam click the level up, you'll get extra Energy.
-Sometimes an enemy will die during the enemy turn, and the next enemy will attack but won't take any cards from your body. I have no idea what causes this.

Random Thoughts:
-I still haven't seen Curse of Believer's Chest
-Some of the choices after killing champions have a correct answer. You ALWAYS want Musket, for example. I forget the others off-hand.
-Blood Hand is the most obnoxious thing in the game. I think I'd rather see it have more health and not have Iron Defense. Or maybe less Attack? I don't know.
-A lot of the unlockable props are bad. I can't remember what's unlocked at which levels, but if I was to play through a clean save file I would probably avoid beating above certain Difficulties as certain characters.

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Regarding characters...

Berserker is a fun introduction to the game but the least interesting character.
-Knee-Breaker should probably deal 2 damage by default. I don't think I've ever used it as a finishing move, and I think it would have to be comboed with This Ends Now to actually trigger. Personally, I'd like to see an insta-kill in every character's kit.
-There was a point in the game where I really disliked Frighten. It just felt cheap to play. I'm not sure what my thoughts are on it now.

Bugmaster is still my favorite character in the game.
-Energy Storage is probably too good, and I don't know what to suggest about that. The big issue is that it combos so well with Proliferation and Rapid Growth.
-I've never played Burst, Behavioral Unification, Call Together, or Drain Life.

Prophet feels so good on some seeds and so terrible on others.
-Prophet probably has the weakest starting deck. Crawling Nightmare is kind of consistently bad. A modified (weaker?) version of Bad Luck might be a much better way to go.
-Like I said, Prophet's kit feels the most luck dependent. Did I pull Astral Vision (or the less good Commune), Cosmic Beam and/or Death's Passing, and a combination of Stargazes, Stargazers (see, needs the name change), Old Dossiers, and Memories to loop?

Chaos Knight was a ton of fun at first but is ridiculously overpowered. I played Difficulty 1 on stream and then went straight to Difficulty 8 and crushed it without even trying. And while I understand Dark Mist (when did that name change happen, by the way?) I'm outright bad at Chaos Knight.
-Chaos Knight has the strongest starting deck in the game by far.
-Shadow Sword is the best starting card in the game, and I'll still frequently use one in the end-game. It needs to be nerfed down to 3/5 damage. Even then it's probably still going to be great.
-Eh, I'm going to save most of my issues with the Chaos Knight for my Daily Challenge rant.

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Daily Challenge thoughts and the problem with going infinite... see, going infinite is one of my favorite aspects of Dark Mist. I played a fair bit of Dominion with a couple of friends a few years back. I really enjoyed the concept of removing cards from a deck and creating an infinite loop to win. It's a fun, solvable challenge. The problem with Daily Challenges is that there are several methods of racking up infinite points if you're patient enough. The first is Vow, which at one time I wanted to see removed from the game entirely for that reason. I almost always choose the Gold instead, but in some seeds Vow can still be a potential problem. Nearly every class has a way to generate infinite damage. Vow allows infinite gold. And Chaos Knight can get infinite damage, infinite experience, infinite gold, AND infinite damnation. Today's Daily Challenge was downright stupid, and I debated how far too take it. My final deck was looping Dark Energy (for Energy), Justice (for Attack), Dark Contract (for experience via Book of Death and then Damnation at the end), and Dark Shadow (to put the curses into enemies and continue looping).

At the very least, most things need to be capped at some point. Attack/Damage should probably be capped at 100 (to one-shot bosses). Level at maybe 30 (or 40, since I think I've hit Level 30 with doubled XP). Energy at 99 because the display looks ugly when you go to triple digits (and at that point you clearly have enough energy to do anything anyway).

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All in all, Dark Mist has been a great ride, and I never would have expected to clock well over 200 hours in it. I keep on expecting to get bored of Daily Challenges, and I've certainly dropped in the standings on Chaos Knight days which has helped with that.

Oh, that's something else: past Daily Challenges should show what the Daily Challenge was (which character and such). It would also be good to have a way to compare your Daily Challenge score(s) to your Steam Friends' scores.

[eidolon232]

-A number on the lower-left(?) to show the number of cards in hand would be helpful. The positions of cards at different hand sizes requires me to count far too often.
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I have missed out on a couple of cards because of this, but after a while you get an eye for this.

I had a lot of fun with Knee-Breaker, but the Finishing Move decks seam way harder to build than a simple Boiling Blood chain.

-I've never played Burst, Behavioral Unification, Call Together, or Drain Life.
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 I only got Drain Life into my deck through an event. If you can lower the cost through your cost reduction effects enough, it can do double duty as an energy generator and kill card in your combo chain, but otherwise it is a rather boring card.
Call Together + on the other hand is awesome with copy effects: Not only because you get all the Banish copies back, but Proliferation+ on Call Together+ allows you to replay as many cards from your block pile as you want.

-Prophet probably has the weakest starting deck. Crawling Nightmare is kind of consistently bad.
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Agreed on the first part. Since I tend to prioritize library manipulation like Divination over damage spells, CN is often one of the only unfair things that you can consistently trigger during stage 2.

I dislike cards like Vow, since the encourage stalling the game long past the point where you could win. The effect also doesn't really fit the concept of a vow: if you have to promise something over and over again without achieving something, a vow becomes less relevant. My idea for a fixed Vow would be a card that does nothing on its own and can't be banished (since a vow is binding), but gives you a strong effect when it is fulfilled: like banish it and gain 100 Gold + 20 XP when you slay a boss while this is in your hand.

Since I don't care about ranking in a singleplayer game without rewards, grinding the daily challenge for max score isn't really an issue for me. For people that are more competitive in that regard, I can see how that can be a problem though...

Thanks for taking the time for this massive post. The forum really could use more active members.

[tiamats4esgares]

Regarding decisions with one true best decision: the choice to take a common, rare, and legendary card or just a legendary. If I'm not mistaken you can chose 10 gold on those choices, making the first option have no drawback.